come Emily Lobb
There the man sees the image clearly at last. There the woman receives her lover into her heart And weeps on his breast, though he never comes. (Wallace Stevens, ‘Poem with Rhythms’)
Come. Where? A fantasy space where the man sees at last the half-glimpsed shadow, where the lovers—separated by lockdown? by the checkmate of circumstance? by silence, fear?— find each other’s arms. And still, even here in the fantasy otherwhere of the poem, the woman waiting for the man she loves remains alone. He doesn’t come; he never comes. This weeping figure: rejected, abandoned, kept from her lover by some cold weatherfront of fate? Or just silent, trapped in the tyranny of the unsaid? You never knew how much I really liked you, because I never even told you, oh but I meant to. Are you still there? 30
